No answer to easy bug policy

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Tue Jul 15 12:30:39 UTC 2008


On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 11:00:22PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 02:04:47AM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > If you don't answer after 2 weeks and one remainder lasting also at
> > least 2 week the package will be orphaned according to the policy stated
> > at <link>
> 
> So that's 4 weeks in all?
> 
> 2 weeks alone is way too short because people commonly go on holiday
> for that length of time & longer.

Yes, IMHO we are being too aggressive at trying to orphan packages from
maintainers. As we are fundamentally a community of volunteers it is 
unreasonable to expect that every maintainer keep up2date with their
their packages on a weekly basis throughout the year. There are periods
when people go on vacation, or when their full-time day job means we
simply cannot even have time to browse the list of BZ email spams, let
alone respond to them.

Defining an aggressive orphaning policy for non-responsiveness is inevitably
going to result in the dismissal of maintainers who are otherwise doing 
a good job.  The primary problem we are trying to address here is how to
get bug fixed in a timely manner. Orphaning a package doesn't solve that
problem, it makes it worse. 

Finding new maintainer(s) is the only way to get the bugs fixed.
Thus we should focus more energy on making sure that *every* package in
our respository has 2 or more maintainers - at very least a a primary
owner, and a co-maintainer.

The process on this page is biased towards quickly removing non-responsive
maintainer. The focus should be on quickly *adding* new co-maintainers.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Policy/NonResponsiveMaintainers

With suitable approved permissions in PKGDB, a co-maintainer can do just
as much as the owner. So provided we can quickly add co-maintainers, 
there is no need to have a short timescale for removing the actual owner.

A 4 week process in which to add a co-maintainer is very reasonable. 

Actually switching the ownership should be longer - 2-3 months. eg,
after a person has been added as co-maintainer, if they have done 1
months good work with no objections then they can request to become
owner. If current owner doesn't object within 4 weeks, then the owner
is demoted to co-maintainer, and the new owner installed.

So that's 4 weeks before someone can starting fixing bugs in a package
but 12 weeks before ownership is finally switched.

Daniel
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